Monday, September 7, 2015

In Which I Wax Superfluous

Nothing approaches the head-lifting sensation of strolling down Waveland Avenue toward Wrigley Field when, a block or so away, you hear the sounds of Gary Pressy's organ wafting over and through the neighborhood. A baseball team might someday replicate Wrigley in dimension and 'hood location, but the history—the literal amount of time, the roughly 36, 500 days that the park has been standing at the corners of Addison and Clark—cannot be matched, and that's brought home for me graphically by those notes lifting and settling over busy game-day streets. My favorite approach to the park is heading west on Waveland toward Sheffield as the rear of the old centerfield sign and flags looms and the place in all of its history and placeness welcomes you. Streaming up the road with hundreds of baseball fans past open-air bars, everything and everyone leaning noisily off of the crowded sidewalks into the narrow, centuries-old streets, knowing that a beery game in the sun awaits you and your buddies: unbeatable.

The game was terrific, a taut pitching affair until the fifth, when Miguel Montero blasted a grand slam that blew things open for the Cubs, who won in front of a packed house. As for the much ballyhooed, and in some corners lamentable, new Jumbotron scoreboards and expanded bleachers—they've been added tastefully and appropriately as far as I'm concerned. Nothing short of a wholesale tear-down of the park could expunge the palpable sense of time and culture and history of this place. Go there.

1 comment:

Author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing (forthcoming), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Conversations With Greil Marcus, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. ✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

MY BOOKS

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches